Hi all,I need advise as to why there would be oil coming back out the breather pipe from the tapet cover to the carb on my mk1 golf?Does this mean I need to do rings and bearings, or something more sinister??

You could also try to fit a splash plate. The old Mk1 engines didn't have one (i.e. one could see the camshaft when looking into the tappet cover). The plate simply lies on top of the camshaft, and it does help somewhat in removing oil droplets from the blow-by gases.

Yes, it could be a ring problem. My old Mk1 had a broken ring and progressive failure of the ring landing, that actually washed out a part of the cylinder wall, so that one piston developed massive blow-by at TDC. In the end it was so bad that travelling on the highway, every few kilometres the breather pipe would actually push a whole "mouthful" of oil through the carburetor, leaving a massive cloud of smoke behind. In town, it actually behaved quite normally.

Does yours smoke a lot, and use oil? How bad is the blow-by if you take the breather pipe off the air cleaner housing and close it with your finger briefly?

My Fox also has some blowby, and after 15,000 km the air cleaner is quite oily in the lower corner. But the engine uses hardly any oil, so I just let it be. So it depends what you mean by "rather excessive".